Nanny Diaries

Chapter 6 - Hiding Out

I wanted to call him. I wanted to like him. That’s a lie. I do like him. I wanted to love him. But... I just couldn’t. It wouldn’t be fair to him. To Angie and Chris. To Matt. 

To me.

Lisa left earlier, and now I’m sitting by myself in my room, turning the piece of paper in my hand. His writing, even that was perfect. Why do I have to torture myself? That’s what I’m doing, dreaming of a guy who can never be a part of my life. 

What if he was, though? What if we got married? Had our own kids? What if I got the happy ending I only ever dream about? I’m a big, gushy romantic, but I could never bring myself to go back to the land that existed for me as a little girl. Fairytale endings, soul mates, all that jazz, that faded away when you got within a whisper’s distance. You reach and it gets pulled away, like a cloud, turning to air, slipping through your fingers. You have to learn to grow up in  a world such as ours, where the only happy endings we get are ones that scrape by divorce, getting by until you grow old and die.  

Except for my parents. They were just as in love as Snow White and her prince. I trace my finger down the spine of my book of fairytales. 

I love Cinderella, but I also love Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. She knew how to get what she wanted. She wanted to live happily ever after with Prince Charming. 

I think that’s the point of fairytales. To embed lessons and inspire young girls everywhere in those stories. 

Sometimes I think my parents were a queen and king, they acted like it. I could see it in their eyes every time they looked at each other. Their love grew stronger every second they spent with each other. 

I pinch the skin under my thigh, bringing me out of the world that once existed, but now is gone forever. I wish I didn’t believe that, but unfortunately, I do. 

I’ve got to stop wishing things. It only makes you more miserable. 

Dreaming of things that are only fantasies. 

I sigh, running my hands through my hair, so done with the string of thoughts that have raced through my head a million times since I turned Zack down on the street while hundreds of New Yorkers streamed by us, not caring at all about two people who have been thrown together for whatever reason, twice, in just a few weeks. No one threw us a second glance. 

God! How did I get here? It started the second I accepted to become a...a surrogate. For their baby. And now, now this guy has come into my life, that I know virtually nothing about. What am I supposed to do?

I don’t know what I can do. 

My mind wanders to Zack again. His dimples that pop up when he smiled. 

At me. 

I go over to sit at my bench under my window. I lift the window and let my fingers dangle, drops of rain falling onto my nails and gleaming in the reflection of the glass.